CODE_COLOR: CODE_YELLOW_MAINNET
RELEASE_VERSION: 2.8.0
PROTOCOL_UPGRADE: TRUE
DATABASE_UPGRADE: FALSE
SECURITY_UPGRADE: FALSE

Protocol Changes

The total number of chunk validators supported by the network is increasing from 300 to 500 allowing more validators to join the network. To maintain the network safety, the number of mandates per shard will also increase from 65 to 105.

Protocol upgrade voting

This release upgrades the protocol version from 79 to 80.
Voting for protocol version 80 will start on Tuesday, September 23, 2025, at 01:00:00 UTC.
To continue participating in consensus, you need to upgrade your mainnet node before this time.

If voting succeeds in one epoch, the protocol upgrade to version 80 is expected to happen 7-8 hours after the voting epoch ends. The targeted upgrade time is Tuesday, September 23, 2025, between 09:00 and 16:00 UTC.

Non-protocol changes

This release addresses an issue in the state snapshot migration, specifically when the hot database path is an absolute path.

Added a neard subcommand tool that can be used to recover data that was lost due to a bug in resharding. (#14185)

Note

Instructions how to use the archival data recovery tool:

# (optional) check that the data is missing 
# each of the following commands should fail with MissingTrieValue
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 75 --check-only
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 76 --check-only
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 78 --check-only

# recover the missing data
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 75
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 76
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 78

# check that the data is no longer missing
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 75 --check-only
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 76 --check-only
neard database archival-data-loss-recovery --protocol-version 78 --check-only